Do All Product Managers Lie on Their Roadmaps?
Yes, but not intentionally.
Recently I had a tweet go unintentionally viral, while I was venting about product roadmaps.
I’ve been practicing product management for over a decade now. It’s not like I don’t use roadmaps. I didn’t mean to call them out as useless. What I did mean to say is that roadmaps, as a means of communication with our customers and stakeholders, are flawed — we don’t literally mean much of what we put in them.
To illustrate this, I’ve put together a researched (that is: made up on the spot) schematic of your typical roadmap. I dare you to tell me that it’s false.
Now before you start writing to the editor: Yes, B2B is so much different than B2C, and not everyone still uses PowerPoint SmartArt templates (although you have to admit, it’s convenient). Some of us split our slides into vision roadmaps, market roadmaps, technical-minded roadmaps. Let me fully disclose that my oversimplification borders on the grotesque. Yet, I’ll bet every practicing product manager will recognize it, smile wryly and remember some of their own roadmaps that had elements of this one.
Mark Twain once told Disraeli there were 3 kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. What he meant by that is that people are good at using numbers and structure to make their knowledge seem more certain than it really is. That’s what I mean by the title of this post: we PMs, we do that with roadmaps. Mark Twain would be all over us.
Don’t Use Your Roadmap to Predict the Future
The way we create structure is we draw our roadmaps based on some things we know for certain we have to do soon, and some vague ideas of the future, that include both the leftovers of what we’ll do soon and great big strategic shifts and changes. We put all that together in a big bowl and mix. But we don’t mix equally. What normally happens is that the less urgent, harder or politically difficult things get pushed to the right. Sometimes the great transformational efforts, the ones we really should be doing right now, are the ones that get pushed all the way to the right. Other times, we just indulge ourselves in window dressing. Apple Watch 5 Support in 2020, re-platforming, and breaking down the monolith. I’ve seen these and many others like them show up on roadmaps. Never did I see them on the very leftmost column.
My intention isn’t to sell you on not using a roadmap as a tool to communicate the product plan to a broad audience. You should do that. By all means, get their feedback, help them prepare for the future and help their teams do their part. Roadmaps can be incredibly useful, for example, as a heads up for a B2B solutions enablement team. They have to know what they’ll need to implement next month and next year.
But what I am suggesting, is that we all recognize that it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future. It gets harder the further out into the future you try to predict.
What this means is that:
- Consumers of roadmaps should get increasingly skeptical the further to the right of the roadmap the presentation gets
- Producers of roadmaps (that’s us PMs) should help the consumers absorb the information by using different levels of detail for near term vs. further out roadmap items. Be very specific about the next few sprints or release. Keep it high-level when you go boldly into the more distant future.
In other words, when reviewing a roadmap, if we’ve made a decision to discontinue our native iOS app next year — by all means, that should be up there. But you can skip the next bullet point about the other 2 things you tentatively plan to do in that release.
